RELEASE DATE: 15 August 2022
Nobody suspects good-natured Skribs’s real job as assassin for the queen.
Everyone else’s eyes? Diverted by the gruesome horrors the Northern ambassador brings for show.
But Skribs’s attention? Fixed where it really matters: protecting his queen’s back.
No one’s getting past this secret hitman today. A cheeky, confident story with ultra-competent characters on display, don’t miss Some Impropriety Expected!
Some Impropriety Expected
Nobody suspected Skribs of being an assassin, and that was his strength. At six-foot-three with limbs that had never outgrown their gangliness and a smile too big for his face, people tended to assume he was still a harmless, good-natured kid.
To be fair, he was.
Except for the kid part.
Lorelei had been an assassin too, at least until her ascension to the throne five years ago. Five-foot-three, with blonde hair down to her hips in its braid and hands so tiny she had to wear child-sized gloves, people tended to assume that she was still a fragile, slightly-serious princess.
To be fair, she did tend to be serious.
Only now, she was a slightly-serious queen.
She’d never been fragile.
Skribs knew that, and loved it best about her; childhood friends, they’d vowed to have either other’s backs forever and all time—and just because she was now the queen, that hadn’t changed a jot.
And so, as the courtiers in their metallic-thread finery, feathers in their puffy hats and crystals in their hair, pearls upon their fingers and ironstars round their necks, all stiffened in shock in the palace’s receiving hall, Skribs came immediately to attention.
He barely noticed the severed head that tumbled to the ground from the wooden box, delivered by an ambassador from the North. It was a Northern ambassador: some impropriety was to be expected.
To be sure, Skribs noted the blood splatter upon the travertine floor that indicated the death was recent; mentally changed his map of the room to avoid that section in case the footing was precarious; added the ambassador to the list of people he’d sooner see dead than alive.
But he was busier staring at another man, across the far side of the hall, who alone seemed less horrified by the severed head than satisfied at Her Majesty’s reaction to it.
Though—Skribs cast her a glance—Lorelei hadn’t in fact reacted to it at all. Not yet. She stood stock still yet, only the slight shift in light from the silver buttons and strips of braid across her formal coat showing that she breathed at all.
Skribs pursed his lips.
He knew what followed a look like that, that moment of perfect stillness, and it was death.
But the man across the way was still staring at Lorelei, keenly, too keenly, and Skribs’ senses were on alert.